Protest is an education

“What experience and history teach is this — that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”

Although Georg Hegel’s words still strike a chord two centuries later, I believe that experience has been my best teacher. Unfortunately I have not always been the most willing or attentive student, and the volume has had to be cranked up louder for me to hear the lesson.

Watching students banging on the doors of learning has reminded me that my most valuable learning at university came from being deeply involved in protest.

I count myself lucky that I managed to get to UCT in 1982. In my first week I joined the staff of Varsity student newspaper. Within a few days I was learning fast by dodging police bullets in Crossroads.

Four years later, I was a delegate when the National Union of South African Students (Nusas) delegation met the ANC leadership in Harare. And in March 1987, having been elected national president of the Nusas, I led a march of student leaders to the Union Buildings, demanding the unbanning of political and student organisations.

I mention these examples because these were both protests and educational acts. They were preceded by mass campaigns - including rallies that were broken up with teargas and sjamboks. Students went door to door in the residences and classrooms, explaining the issues.

A lot like what we’ve seen this week but surrounded by much fiercer repression - including detention without trial, torture, assassination of activists and massacres.

While writing this article I have been watching live footage of students being teargassed and shot at with stun grenades at Parliament with a tragic sense of déjà vu.

And I heard the Speaker adjourning parliament, telling the honourable members to stay in their offices until it was safe to leave.

Members of parliament were being instructed to hide their faces, while students were being beaten because they were demanding to be heard.

On 6 October, President Zuma announced the establishment of a task team that would “explore solutions to short-term student funding challenges”, including “officials from the department of higher education and training, the presidency, NSFAS, two Vice-Chancellors representing the leadership of universities, two student representatives, as well as other higher education stakeholders”.

At face value, the task team is a good starting point but often such structures are used to defuse protest. They get bogged down in bureaucracy, and become slow and ineffectual.

They end up in detailed negotiations and processes within government, between departments and the finance ministry who ultimately determine how funds are allocated.

Sustained pressure will be needed to overcome institutional inertia.

Strong organisations will be needed that generate effective leadership, that take the time to learn from experience and that are accountable to the people they represent. Small bands of destructive militants – the “unguided missiles” – alienate potential supporters, whereas effective protest brings people along and builds alliances.

After the democratic elections in 1994, I spent five years working in the first democratic government, doing my best to implement Reconstruction and Development Projects and to develop new policy and strategies.

We learned many lessons about how hard it is to transform institutions.

And how good intentions and the best strategies are constantly sabotaged by selfinterest and greed.

Many of yesterday’s leaders have been sucked into the stultifying grip of inflexible and unresponsive machines. Gradually they have become slaves to the very forces they rebelled against, and beneficiaries of countless self-enrichment schemes.

The government’s poor record of service delivery, the constant stream of corruption scandals and ongoing poverty has created fertile ground for these protests to spread rapidly.

Appalled as I have been to watch history repeating itself, I keep hoping that the students will remind those who are now in power of what they used to stand for. And I hope that they will listen, reflect and respond.

The signs are not good that this will happen.

The ANC government has not shied away from unleashing violence against protestors.

It has not proved responsive to popular pressure. And all its cheap talk of combating corruption has been so ineffectual, that one can only conclude it is intentionally so.

But repression did not work in the 1970s and the 1980s and there is even less chance of it working now. Just about everyone has a cell phone and there is no shortage of ways to disseminate information.

Until the leaders of yesterday’s revolution start listening and making real changes, they can rest assured that the new generation of leaders will keep cranking up the volume.

• Steve Kromberg was the president of the National Union of South African Students (Nusas) in the late 80s. He is the former Director of the David Rabkin Project for Experiential Journalism which owns Gro

cott’s Mail.